But you can’t give your heart to a wild thing: the more you do, the stronger they get. Until they’re strong enough to run into the woods. Or fly into a tree. Then a taller tree. Then the sky. That’s how you’ll end up, Mr. Bell. If you let yourself love a wild thing. You’ll end up looking at the sky.
The instant she saw the letter she squinted her eyes and bent her lips in a tough tiny smile that advanced her age immeasurably. “Darling,” she instructed me, “would you reach in the drawer there and give me my purse. A girl doesn’t read this sort of thing without her lipstick.
It’s like Tiffany’s,” she said. “Not that I give a hoot about jewelry. Diamonds, yes. But it’s tacky to wear diamonds before you’re forty; and even that’s risky. They only look right on the really old girls. Maria Ouspenskaya. Wrinkles and bones, white hair and diamonds. I can’t wait.
And yes, to answer you seriously, I am beginning to be... well, not bored, but tempted; afraid, but tempted. When you’ve been in pain for a long time, when you wake up every morning with a rising sense of hysteria, then boredom is what you want, marathon sleeps, a silence in yourself.
Randolph,” he said, “were you ever as young as me?” And Randolph said: “I was never so old.
What I’ve found does the most good is just to get into a taxi and go to Tiffany’s. It calms me down right away, the quiteness and the proud look of it; nothing very bad could happen to you there.
They shared a doom against which virtue was no defense.
They can romanticize us so, mirrors, and that is their secret: what a subtle torture it would be to destroy all the mirrors in the world: where then could we look for reassurance of our identities?
I’ve got to stay awake,′ she said, punching her cheeks until the roses came. ‘There isn’t time to sleep, I’d look consumptive, I’d sag like a tenement, and that wouldn’t be fair: a girl can’t go to Sing Sing with a green face.
I’d rather have cancer than a dishonest heart. Which isn’t being pious. Just practical.
Freedom may be the most important thing in life, but there’s such a thing as too much freedom.
Randolph,” he said, “do you know something? I’m very happy.” To which his friend made no reply. The reason for this happiness seemed to be simply that he did not feel unhappy; rather, he knew all through him a kind of balance. There was little for him to cope with.
It is well known that women outlive men; could it merely be superior vanity that keeps them going?
How do you feel if you’re in love? she asked. Ah, said Rosita with swooning eyes, you feel as though pepper has been sprinkled on your hear, as though tiny fish are swimming in your veins.
He had no thought of how it was before he came to the farm. His memory of those times was like a house where no one lives and the furniture has rotten away.
Thackeray’s a good writer and Flaubert is a great artist. Trollope is a good writer and Dickens is a great artist. Colette is a very good writer and Proust is a great artist. Katherine Anne Porter was an extremely good writer and Willa Cather was a great artist.
Aside from all else, there is some truth in that; clocks indeed must have their sacrifice: what is death but an offering to time and eternity?
One lost an IQ point for every year spent on the West Coast.
How silly, my dear; don’t you know that if I came here as a child, then most of me never left?
I knew Faulkner very well. He was a great friend of mine. Well, as much as you could be a friend of his, unless you were a fourteen-year-old nymphet. Then you could be a great friend!